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When I heard something on TV about getting an Phone for $50, I thought about the people I know who paid $600 for theirs. I am not an early adopter of new technology (unless it is free, of course), since I am old enough to remember Betamax. You might have to look that one up, since it is not on the list of the 15 Biggest Fails for Techies Who Bought the Wrong Gear Too Early. This is a slide show of things you may regret having bought when they first came on the market, because the price dropped, it became obsolete, or you can’t upgrade the early models. Shown is the Amazon Kindle.
The Kindle’s transformation from luxury gadget to impulse buy isn’t based on a single moment but rather on a series of price drops that broke the hearts of early adopters. If you bought a Kindle 2 in February 2009, it cost $359. Five months later, $299. Three months after that, $259. By June 2010, the Kindle 2 cost $189–and if you thought that was a good time to pull the trigger, July brought word of the Kindle 3, including a Wi-Fi model for $139. In less than a year and a half, the Kindle had become thinner, lighter, and $220 cheaper.
Maybe one day I will get around to buying one. Link -via Interesting Pile
Kevin Kelly, an editor for Wired and Cool Tools, points out something that is both simple and profound. No piece of technology, once it becomes widely used, ever goes extinct. It doesn’t matter if that technology has become obsolete. There are and always will be people who will continue to produce it. Robert Krulwich of NPR reports:
Nothing? I asked. Brass helmets? Detachable shirt collars? Chariot wheels?
Nothing, he said.
Can’t be, I told him. Tools do hang around, but some must go extinct.
If only because of the hubris — the absolute nature of the claim — I told him it would take me a half hour to find a tool, an invention that is no longer being made anywhere by anybody.
Go ahead, he said. Try.
If you listen to our Morning Edition debate, I tried carbon paper (still being made), steam powered car engine parts (still being made), Paleolithic hammers (still being made), 6 pages of agricultural tools from an 1895 Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalogue (every one of them still being made), and to my utter astonishment, I couldn’t find a provable example of an technology that has disappeared completely.
Link and Link via GearFuse | Photo: Archaeology.org
The items featured here are so old, obsolete, awful or just plain stupid that we are horrified that people might be actually checking these items out and depending on the information.
This blog contains actual library holdings. No specific libraries or librarians are named to protect the guilty. Check your shelves, it could be you.
Link -via J-Walk Blog
